“I don’t know if it’s stupidity, stubbornness or just a bad habit that keeps me going,” Morris said in response to a question about how he remains remarkably productive.

“I don’t question it much. There’s a lot of it that’s intuitive. I’ve learned to trust it. I’m going to be 80 tomorrow and I still feel like a welterweight.”

The drawings scattered on a table at the R.B. Stevenson Gallery — where “Quick Draw,” an exhibition of his recent drawings, opens Sept. 14 — were a testament that Morris is not only still in the ring, he’s still bringing it.

An uncompromising artist who has earned considerable esteem in San Diego, and over the last decade equal acclaim elsewhere, Morris is best known for his paintings — the focus of a well-received 2005 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld (Germany).

He has been drawing, however, since the beginning. And these relatively new, small-scale works hark back to his abstract expressionist roots. They have a visceral energy that was more subtly expressed in his earlier pieces, particularly those of the ’70s that seemed a response to minimalism.

“I loved minimalism,” Morris said. “But I just couldn’t join in on it. It wasn’t part of my temperament. But I appreciate those guys breaking the mold — walking away from this tremendous habit.”

Morris was also concerned that abstract expressionism could become repetitive, even with an artist’s best intentions. But now he finds himself inevitably returning to it.

“That’s where I’m at,” he said. “I haven’t been able to put on the brakes and level my head and get at something else. I can’t do it. So I stick with this.

“I still think it’s valid. I really like these things (spread out on the table). I love them. I haven’t seen them in months. Some of them I’ve done this year, but I throw them in boxes when I’m done. But now that I see them out, I think they have a kind of nice gusto to them.”

Artistic impulses

In understanding Morris and his work, it helps to know he once aspired to be a jazz musician. He still owns a C melody sax, although he said he’d be hard pressed to find it given the condition of his longtime studio in Golden Hill.

“I wanted to play like Charlie Parker and that kind of stuff,” Morris said. “I heard a lot of jazz over the years and it still means a lot to me — Coleman Hawkins, the earlier things. Lester Young blew my mind, and Count Basie, sitting back there playing behind Billie Holiday, it just tore my mind up.”

Some of his earliest drawings combine his passions, including one of Lester Young that he submitted to “Downbeat,” then the bible of jazz.

“They rejected it, of course,” Morris said. “OK, I realized I could handle rejection. From then on, there were a lot of rejections. I think it’s still going on. I’ve been booted out of a lot of shows.”

Eventually, his artistic impulses overcame his musical ones, although he tried in his drawings and paintings to capture that “gusto” he heard in jazz.

“The first time I heard Coltrane, he was doing something called ‘Chasing the Trane,’ ” Morris said. “I thought, ‘What … is he doing? He’s getting all over that horn, around it, and in it and over it.’ About the third time I heard it, I thought, ‘I know what you are doing, you rascal, you wild man.’

“I wanted that energy in my drawings also. That inscrutability, really — just to have these tiny little gestures.”

As much as jazz and art, Morris, who arrived in San Diego in 1956 fresh out of the Navy, also immersed himself in poetry and literature. As he never attended art school (although he taught art briefly at what’s now the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego with Guy Williams and Malcolm McClain), books were the basis of his art education — and an important part of his livelihood. Over the years, he worked at Vroman’s (with Storm), the Bargain Bookstore, the Lanning Bookshop and Wahrenbrock’s (he’s outlived them all).

“I read a lot about art history and I’m affected by all of it,” Morris said. “Oriental, European, American — I still just absorb it. A lot of this (he pointed to the new drawings) is referential. Picasso told us we could steal, so we steal.”

Practical concerns

Some commentators have mentioned how Morris seemed to absorb every trend in 20th-century art into his work, but as much as he was affected by art history, he was equally influenced by his circumstances. If his choice of everyday materials has historical resonance, his motivation for using it was more practical.

“A lot of the reason for doing that was simply the cost of materials,” he said. “There were a lot of years where I just didn’t have money. The jobs that I had didn’t really pay for it. I had to scuffle.”

His recent drawings, made with cheap markers on scrap paper, are also the result of circumstance. His studio has become so crammed with stuff — books, art, records and other treasures — that he no longer has room to paint. He found the situation depressing, but still managed to create art, doing the drawings on the steps leading to his overflowing basement studio.

“I was angry, wasting time being bored, and this kicked me into action,” said Morris, who credits the “boredom, anger, action” idea to Gustav Eckstein in his book “The Body Has a Head.”

Morris is anything but bored, but he apparently has not completely moved out of the anger stage.

“It’s a terrible place,” he said of his studio. “I should have been out of there 20 years ago. I don’t recommend that artists work in basements. It’s not magic. Debauchery and masochism is all it is.”

But he seems ready to take action.

He wants to get a larger space and not only paint, but paint on much bigger canvases (similar in scale to his work in the “Murals of La Jolla” public art project: “Applied,” at 7744 Faye Ave.).

“I’d like to get back to sculpture, too,” Morris said. “I’d like to flex a little before I die. It’s all precious. Every day is precious. Every minute is precious.”

Richard Allen Morris

Born: Aug. 9, 1933

Background: Grew up in Torrington, Wyo. Joined the Navy after high school, discharged in San Diego in 1956

Formal art education: None

Self-education: Voracious reader who worked at Vroman’s, the Bargain Bookstore, the Lanning Bookshop and Wahrenbrock (all now defunct)

First retrospective exhibition: “Richard Allen Morris: Retrospective 1958-2004” at Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld (Germany) in 2004 and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2005

Quote: “He has never changed his attitude: Art first. Money never tempted him despite offers of assistance. … I think about Richard often. He remains my role model.” — John Baldessari in catalog essay for Haus Lange/MCASD retrospective